minneapolis – Page 4

November 17, 2011

Cranberry Compote Quark + Toasted Walnuts

Let the festivities begin.

The seasons constantly drive our creativity in some form or another. In the Spring, Summer, and Fall we get to take advantage of the growing season and the harvest. In the Winter we’re driven first by the holidays and then by the pure, unadulterated boredom that follows until Spring. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The holidays are in front of us and this is one of our first flavors drawn from traditional holiday fare.

Sometimes, its a matter of taking a few staple ingredients and figuring out how to make them just a little more interesting. In this case, we knew we wanted to use cranberries in a flavor leading up to Thanksgiving.

A few years ago I made a cheesecake topped with a Cranberry compote to bring to the Thanksgiving feast and I thought it would be an interesting approach to an ice cream flavor.

Awfully pretty in their fresh state, no?

To start, the compote. To nip the bitterness of the cranberries’ in the proverbial bud, this particular compote leans on lemon juice and lemon zest.

Compote…

In place of a cheesecake crust, we opted for crushed walnuts toasted on the dark side and lightly candied with brown sugar.

Not a bad snack either…

Finally, to get the whole dimension of the cheesecake, we opted for some Quark cheese from Milton Creamery in Iowa. It needs to be noted that Milton is the home of one of our favorite cheeses in the land (Prairie Breeze). Both can be found at our almost daily haunt, the Seward Co-Op in South Minneapolis.

Quark is a fresh, soft cheese similar to cream cheese but has a tangier flavor that stands out better in ice cream. In this case some was blended into the base of the cream, and some of the quark was frozen ahead of time and crumbled into the base for an extra rich bite here and there.

Its more fun to say “Quark” anyway.

Lastly, the compote was layered in the pint as the ice cream went in.

A nice red compliment to the white cream…if we do say so ourselves.

Want to try? As we do every week, we’ll be giving away two pints. Just leave a comment on our facebook page to be entered into the drawing. If you don’t have a facebook account, leave a comment right here on the blog. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (11/10/2011) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page. Our only conditions are you must be able to pick it up here in Minneapolis, and be willing to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck!

November 3, 2011

Apple Fritter Apple Fritter

The apple fritter is one of the best things ever fried by man.

A few weeks ago, I attended a breakfast which happened to include a glorious platter full of a wide variety of donuts. Cake donuts , Raised donuts, Crullers, Bismarcks…the gamut. Only one problem. Actually a major problem. There was only one apple fritter sitting on top of that pile, like an anchor keeping the rest from floating away, and before my gluttonous brain had time to signal my hands into action, it was gone.

The loss instantly triggered a quest for top notch fritters in the Twin Cities, and a recent jackpot trip to Mel-O-Glaze in South Minneapolis found me standing in front of a pile of them “fresh out the fryer”.

However, the plans for them mostly included ice cream. Truthfully that was the only plan. The goal was to see if we could make an ice cream that fully and accurately represented all of the goodness that is the Apple Fritter. Which meant more than just simply throwing chunks of them into a cream.

It also had to pay off some of the willpower it was going to take to not eat my way through the bag I just bought.

I will repeat: willpower.

As we do in many of our flavors that incorporate a baked good, a few of these fritters were cubed and baked off in the oven until they were dried out and crunchy. Unfortunately, this process actually made them even better, and harder to resist.

Little nuggets of pure gold.

As you might remember from the Apple Crisp flavor a few weeks back, we had some fantastic heirloom Wolf River apples we roasted and as it happened there were a few left. A nice little extra apple flavor to pair with the fritter.

Finally my favorite part – the last of the fritters were thrown into the cream base, to take a nice long bath and leech all of their apple frittery essence into the base.

This is where the Apple Fritter gets doubled up.

What we ended up with was nothing but apple fritter. Apple fritter ice cream, littered with chunks of roasted apples and apple fritter croutons.

And as every week previous, you can win one of two available pints of this weeks flavor, just leave a comment on our facebook page to be entered into the drawing. If you don’t have a facebook account, leave a comment right here on the blog. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (11/4/2011) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page. Our only conditions are you must be able to pick it up here in Minneapolis, and be willing to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck!

May 18, 2011

Brown Butter Popcorn

Around a year ago, I found myself snooping around the kitchen on a Friday night looking for ingredients I had on hand to mix up a new flavor. Often times, trying to find creativity with a multitude of options at the grocery store can be self defeating, and I’ll end up defaulting to something I know rather than coming up with a new idea. Since the stores were already closed anyway, I opted to force myself to create with what I had at my disposal. Using this method can definitely up the “weirdness ratio” as far as flavors of ice cream are concerned, but every once in awhile we hit on something.

In this instance, the decision ended up being Popcorn. We’ve had success with both roasted and fresh sweet corn ice cream late in the summer, and our cornbread ice cream has always been well received, so why not try another variety?

I popped a fresh batch on the range, pureed it (pureed popcorn is interesting on its own – a substance that kind of resembled Styrofoam) and went about figuring out how to make the ice cream taste like popcorn without having to navigate the chewy kernels.

While Caramel corn was a tempting idea, and one that we’ll probably pursue in the future, we chose to go with a straight up popcorn flavor. However, as a twist we decided to add some brown butter to the base to bring out a little more of the nutty/buttery flavor popcorn gets from popping in a pan. Oh..and maybe add a little extra fat.

We ended up with a near perfect match. As we do every week, we’re giving away a pint of this weeks flavor, so be the first to comment here or on our Facebook page and you can judge for yourself.

May 3, 2011

Gingerbread

This seemingly endless winter got me thinking of the gingerbread my mom used to make when I was a kid. We always used to eat it warm with a big scoop of homemade whipped cream on top. It was hard to beat the comfort of the warm gingerbread melding with the cream. We didn’t have it that often as kids, but it has always been one of my sleeper favorites. Finding a way to make this an ice cream has been on my mind the last few weeks, and seemed like a natural combination. Thankfully my mom happily turned over the Gingerbread recipe and we were on our way.

Within a couple hours, I had a piping hot loaf of gingerbread, just like moms used to make.

These babies needed to be substantial in the mix, so it seemed right to cube them and bake them off a bit more to make sure they retain their flavor but didn’t get soggy in the batter.

Crunchy, chewy gingerbread croutons, ready to do their thing…all of those little crumbs, collateral damage from being tossed on the pan, baked much quicker and became more carmalized in the process. That flavor couldn’t go to waste and added a nice subtle, dimension to the overall flavor of the final product.

Left the cream base unflavored (other than sugar) to duplicate the clean taste of whipped cream.

Gave those little gingerbread croutons a spin in the batter..

Froz.

It turned out exactly as we were hoping. Leaving vanilla or any other flavors out of the base gave the ice cream the pure cream taste we were looking for, and let the plentiful, crunchy chunks of gingerbread do all of the work. Seems like it would make a great Christmas time scoop, but equally appropriate for right now as far as I’m concerned.

April 28, 2011

Inspiration of the motherly kind…

There is a lot of baking involved in making our ice cream, and we both drew lucky straws with mothers who are fantastic bakers in their own right. However, there’s no chance involved in the amount of inspiration our ice cream making has drawn from desserts our mothers made for us as kids. With the launch of our site , and more importantly mother’s day coming up, it only seems right that our next few flavors pay some homeage to the wonderful women that got us started on this journey. New flavors coming tomorrow. Stay tuned.